Destination known and looking for jobs!: Dakhla, Egypt

We decided to go check out the oasis of Egypt. This was a little tricky. We took a late train from Luxor north into a city called Asyut. We had read in several other travel blogs that tourists weren’t really supposed to be in Asyut. The train roles into Asyut around 3am and as soon as we get off the train, there is a tourist police asking where we are planning on going. We tell him we’re going to take the bus to Dakhla oasis. He explains to us that the bus doesn’t leave for Dakhla until 11am and that we can either stay in the train station café until the bus station opens in the morning or he could walk us over the a hotel by the bus station where we could get a room. We decide to be escorted to the hotel to catch a few winks. The only room the hotel had open was a small little closet with a twin bed in it that smelled like paint fumes, but Jeff and I opened the window and cuddled for a couple of hours until it was time to catch the bus.

We buy tickets and get on the bus. The bus drives a little ways out of town and stops at a tourist police station where we have to hand over our passports for a couple of minutes. Passports back in hand, we’re off to Dakhla. The landscape driving across the desert is a vast area of dusty, sandy, nothingness with an thin line of asphalt running through it. There are check points along the asphalt line where the bus slows down and the only thing we can understand the driver say to the tourist police manning the checkpoint is “Americanos”. The police would take a quick glance, spot us through the window and away the bus went again.

We reach Dakhla seven hours after leaving Asyut. We get off the bus, gather our things and are trying to decide which way to go the find the hotel we read about in Lonely Planet when a motorcycle pulls up. The driver introduces himself as Sam and asks where we are staying. When we tell him the name, he says that that hotel is closed, but he has a hotel we could stay at. Jeff and I exchanged a glance that Sam caught and told Jeff to get his motorcycle and he would show him the closed hotel. So as Jeff sped away on the back of motorcycle without a helmet in the middle of nowhere Egypt, I was left on the street corner to worry about 1) my husband’s safety and 2) what was I going to do if he never came back. But luckily in a few minutes he did reappear, safely, confirming the hotel was closed. We decided to follow Sam back to his family’s hotel, which is when things started to slide a little bit.

We end up listening to Sam trying to sell us a tour of Dakhla and White Desert for about 45 minutes. When the price of the tours comes up, he wants more money then what we want to pay and his brother is on the stairs making hand signals not to take the tour. We tell Sam thanks but no thanks. We are advised to take showers before we went to eat because the water got shut off after a certain time. Ok, no problem. So after dinner we went back to our room (which we have already paid two nights for) and on closer inspection there broken glass on the floor and a termite nest in the corner of one of the twin beds. So Jeff and I ended up in our sleeping bags cuddling in a twin bed again, making the best of things!

The next day we wandered around the town of Dakhla. When we wandered into the neighborhoods one kid would run up to us yelling ‘hello’ and the next thing you knew 20 other kids were running behind us. They were really sweet and kept wanting Jeff to take pictures of them so they could see themselves on the camera screen.

We walked down to the tourist office to get some information only to find it was closed. Across the street was Abu Mohamed Restaurant where we decided to grab some lunch. Abu Mohamed makes a wonderful lentil soup and after lunch he arranged for transportation and guided us around Dakhla. We went to a place called Magic Springs, where the warm water bubbles up with the sand. It was kind of like swimming in thin warm quick sand. We saw the old town that was made out of mud bricks. We walked up the sand dunes right outside the oasis. We also visited a another warm spring that was pumped out the ground into an irrigation line where the locals (and Jeff) went swimming. We returned to Abu Mohamed’s restaurant, ate a wonderful dinner, and he helped us arrange a tour into the White Desert. So one more night in our sleeping bags in our twin bed and then it is off the oasis of Farafra for our camping trip into the desert!